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“Essentially, design begins by selecting a single line. It is not a matter of choosing any line, this one or that one or any other one. Design is a matter of choosing a specific line, the only possible one.” [i]

What line of thought can properly distinguish the architecture of Makoto Sei Watanabe? Architectural monographs tend to conform to a predictable format while architecture, on the other hand, seeks and embodies change, evolution, adaptation, and occasionally true experimentation.

To introduce the work of Watanabe, using his own principles of design, one is tempted to follow a textual approach, by deploying concepts such as genetic process, programming,complexity science, computers as extensions of the brain, artificial life, genetic algorithms and neural network programs. Such a monograph would offer a parallel discourse to the projects and works which, more than describing, explaining, and interpreting them, would construct frames of thought in symbiosis with the architect’s practice. In this context, judgmental criticism, whether laudatory or hostile, would not be the objective.

A virtual navigational/browsing tool might better describe the suggested approach. The printed page remains an obstacle to the ideal – even if attempts are regularly made to overcome the limitations of print. An essay nonetheless encapsulates in one reproducible object thoughtful and ineffaceable data which document a specific point in time. Whereas digitized material tends to blur its moment of creation, the “book,” to use a generic term, bears a time-stamp.

Watanabe’s architecture is a physical reality. Beyond experiencing it – as do thousands of passengers in his Iidabashi subway station every day –an introduction to his work must propose a set of multiple, and if necessary contradictory views. Then, contrary to design as “a matter of choosing a specific line, the only possible one”, a monograph on his work becomes a task of crafting not merely certain lines selected from the many possible, but rather a set of simultaneous multiple lines, continuously intertwining, diverging and again coalescing.

Following this sort of parallel-thinking methodology, akin to “parallel computer processing,” we could harness Watanabe’s own theoretical production, designed and completed work. For example, we can elaborate on the “genetic” concept at the heart of Watanabe’s work. If automatic writing was originally explored by the Surrealists, then formally theorized and implemented by the Oulipo team (Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, among others), and later deployed in literature by William Burrough’s “cut-up” techniques well in advance of sampling techniques in music, the idea of producing some sort of “genetic writing” about architecture remains an ideal thus far unrealized. If “designing without the hand,” as Watanabe puts it, is becoming possible, then, symmetrically the challenge would be “writing without the brain,” or would this really be the equivalent ? To “things not designed” we might try to answer with “texts not written”: all available data on Watanabe’s work compiled, and then processed and resynthesized by a specific software organizing images, designs, concepts, in one comprehensive discourse.But such software does not exist as yet. And even if it existed, the written format abstract would be merely a pale shadow of the digital original. But when Watanabe insists on “designing without hand”, he of course means “designing with the brain.” And here it cannot be confused with the automatic and autonomous trials and methods used by the Surrealists writers and artists and their followers in the XXth century, even if those “psycho-technics” were also using the brain of the artist or poet.

Again, concerning Watanabe’s “genetics,” one must first discern the broad evolution of Japanese contemporary architecture since the sixties. The longstanding interest of Japanese architects in biological analogy formed an important part of the Metabolist movement which at least influenced, and more likely directly endowed, Watanabe’s genetic thought. On the other hand, the Japanese context is one where, unlike in the Western architectural world, architects of particular, idiosyncratic and unique attitudes appear on the architectural scene and establish a body of work owing little to local “schools” or “movements” in architecture. After the climax of the Metabolist movement, what remains, apart from a handful of masters playing the orthodox international game, is a fragmented landscape where such names as Toyo Ito, Sanaa, Shigeru Ban, Shuhei Endo, Hitoshi Abe, Kengo Kuma, each seem to go their own way, unmolested by affiliations (“genetic concerns”) or schools of thought. Makoto Sei Watanabe belongs to such a dispersed field and stands as an architect resisting any easy classification. Those architects are, of course, at the same time, worthy subjects of monographs, for, even if their works can be and are often scattered around various media (international architecture press, anthologies of contemporary architecture, museum collections and catalogues such as those from the Archilab/Frac Centre), the appropriate vehicle to fully explore their achievements remains the monograph.

THE MECHANICS OF JELLY FISHES

A closer understanding of the work now becomes essential. The point is not to “explain” the work as a whole and/or each work separately for those who will not have a chance to visit the architectures, nor to comment upon the work and the photographs included here, but rather to reawaken contemporary architectural thought.Such a task of starting again and again, of reformulating the discipline of architecture anew, is one that only few architects explicitly undertake, and even few critics would acknowledge. With Watanabe, it is not idle rhetoric to submit that something close to that reformulation of architecture takes place. The means employed by Watanabe are those of experimentation in figure and language. Two apparently contradictory figures play a crucial role in his work : that of mechanics and that of organic systems. This conjunction between a biomorphic universe and man-made technological artifacts might be illustrated by the juxtaposition of a jellyfish with a motor engine. Watanabe is committed to dual thinking as he will probe for the mechanics at work in a jellyfish and, at the same time, for the biological paradigms increasingly embedded in contemporary computer software. To shift constantly between these models is the challenge facing the architect in pursuit of today’s extremely mobile conceptual frameworks at work in all fields of research and practice. How can architecture learn from biology and from mechanics, from nature and from culture, from what is given beforehand and from what is transformed, invented, created by civilizations ?

The work of Makoto Sei Watanabe can be divided into three main programmatic categories: single architectural programs, infrastructural programs, and research on city growth and design. In the first instance, Watanabe’s completed projects, such as the Aoyama Technical College, or designs such as the Jelly Fish House series (extending from 1990 to 1997) have attained a powerful, iconic status. The architect has developed his thought in the infrastructural domain through four railway stations, now all completed — Kyusyu Shinkansen and Minamata Stations, and two Tsukuba Express stations: Kashiwanoha-Campus and Kashiwa-Tanaka — and the overall design of a new large subway station in Tokyo, Iidabashi Station. Lastly, Watanabe’s research practice has been well published in Japan and abroad under the generic title of “Induction Design”.

The question immediately arises as to what extent the different architectonic domains cross-breed within the office, in effect exchanging genes within the corpus of concepts and design processes. More specifically, what are the principles and the “engine” of such a multi-faceted architectural practice ?

Behind each of those works constituting the backbone of his practice, stands a unifying theoretical quest and principle. Watanabe has indeed pursued and developed a single general theme continuously since 1990 under the name of “Induction Design”. During this lapse of time, in support of the same overall goal, he has exploited the rapid evolution of software and adapted it to his ongoing projects. Thus, the Shin-Minamata Mon (2004-05) in the Kumamoto prefecture is also referred to as “Induction Design V”. The pivotal point of this project was to set load-bearing parameters on variably calculated values, so that the computer program would vary the widths of the structural members to equalize the stresses acting on each member’s cross-section. The process can be seen as twofold :

Form generating: basing the web pattern on structural demands — the length of the web, angles of branches, and loads that it must bear ;

Structure optimizing: solving for the minimum number of members while ensuring a sound structure.

Following the principles of Induction Design, the Shin-Minamata Mon design was generated by the program for the two basic elements defining any architecture: structure and spatial forms. The result unmistakably displays the qualities of plants, trees or other natural organisms, for the simple reason that the structures and forms reflect a design process resembling that of nature, thanks to the power of computer simulation. Whereas architects today indulge as much as ever in literal metaphor, here the conceptual meets and fuses with the metaphorical.

Watanabe insists: To use chaos theory and fractals is not to create forms resembling Lorenz attractors, or jagged outlines. Instead of forms, it is the process which contributes to design.”[ii]While in the 60’s the Japanese Metabolists’ fascination with nature led them often to explore the metaphorical side without sufficient critical sense, Watanabe, thanks to software unavailable to the pioneering generation of organically-focused architects, is firmly committed to going far beyond the metaphorical use of nature.The architect directs a process, sets the general framework, chooses the parameters, guides the whole design and retains the “final cut”; only he is entitled to stop the artificial growth process when the result meets his own criteria. The Shin-Minamata Mon – in Japanese Mon means gate - stands in front of the railway station, designed also by Watanabe, for the city tragically known for the disease produced by industrial excesses. Its steel members reach toward the sky, in opposition to the railway station which keeps the focus on horizontal motion.

This project is a successor of the “Web Frame” designed for the Iidabashi Subway Station. Therefore, Shin Minamata Mon looks like a tree, but it is not a copy of the form of a tree, to quote its architect. Indeed, the object produced is an artifact embedding the essence of natural evolution and genetically-coded systems such as those guiding the growth of every tree, but it is an abstract equivalent – or cousin? - of natural phenomena. Numbers, figures and mathematical operations executed by the software used by the architect have replaced the usual drafting tools. An urban gate, stripped of any monumental, historical or political symbols becomes here just a gate to pass through; it is more than the idea of a gate, for it appears in its physical and visual reality, but it shuns any literal narrative other than its conceptual and visible links with natural forms. Interestingly enough, it does not easily relate to contemporary art or sculpture. Even conceptual sculpture is irrelevant to this piece. However, there exists a subtle subterranean connection between the Shin Minamata gate and certain works of Isamu Noguchi. In his career, the Japanese-American sculptor developed an interpretation of nature which brought him in the vicinity of such formal research.

One inescapable reading of such works as the K.Museum and the Aoyama College is a sustained fascination with the mechanical world. The college presents both a mechanical formal appearance and an obvious zoomorphic image. Contrary to the later Shin Minamata Mon project, the College neither clings to an abstract level nor shies away from the omnipresent figurative or pictorial potential of architecture. Tokyo’s urban landscape is renowned for being a never-ending cornucopia of signs of all sorts. The cinematic quality of the metropolis has been widely remarked and exploited in numerous works.

A good example of the machine meeting the zoomorph and/or the anthropomorph is the famous “transformer” toys produced in Japan in recent decades. Although Watanabe does not elaborate in his writings about that source of architectural ideas, its presence can not be denied. The upper part of the College seems to throw insect-like rods into the urban void and looks as if it were ready to jump and start a frantic ride into the Tokyo landscape. A “run for your life” and urge to leave earth’s grounds are evident in many of Watanabe’s buildings.

For example, the cantilevered compact steel block of the K.Museum looks like a piece of artificial structure trying to fly away from earth. The exterior grounds are reworked in another artificial/natural chunk of landscape where his favorite steel masts raking the wind have displaced mundane plants and trees. This obvious mimicry of life forms sets the tone of a disillusioned world. The Museum’s focus was the underground network of energy and water distribution, as well as garbage vacuumed collecting for the entire city. It is located on the new development area gained on the waters of the Tokyo bay.

Ironically the Museum has been closed to the public for security reasons, and it seems almost as if Watanabe’s architecture had anticipated this fate by conveying much dramatic and graphic power through the shapes used in the building. Its scale, for instance, is difficult to grasp from outside, and it hesitates between a large impenetrable sculpture and a small building. In a totally opposite setting, another cantilevered configuration is adopted to extend the presence of a program in its environment : the Mura-No Terrace reaches out in the landscape, stretching out a dramatic cantilever as if it was trying to fly over the wooded hills surrounding it.

AOYAMA COLLEGE AND BEYOND

Watanabe stands certainly as a singular architect in contemporary Japanese architecture. He remains a free-rider, impossible to pigeonhole into any one school and even less into one style. To be sure, biographical facts as always can offer some clues. One does not work for five years at A.Isosaki’s firm without revealing some traces. One does not live and work in Japan without its culture and landscape influencing your evolution as an architect. Even if Watanabe volunteers no link with Shin Takamatsu’s early work, it is difficult, when visiting the Aoyama College, not to discern parallels with the Kyoto architect. Both make exuberant gestures with large, shiny industrial elements that could be borrowed from a garage shop or an ocean liner’s boiler room. However, Watanabe’s asymmetric works, in contrast to the symmetrical compositions of Takamatsu’s architecture, clearly differentiate the two architects. Moreover Watanabe, by simulating through computing the naturals laws of growth, ignores the compositional paradigm – an obsolete straitjacket which still confines architecture today.

The substantial efforts toward liberation by the Deconstructivist architects in the 90’s have made progress, aided by new software which enables any designer to escape the burden of architectural doctrines from Antiquity to the XX°century Modern dogmas. In a way, it is tempting to consider that the Aoyama Technological College plays for Watanabe the role that the Vienna office extension did for CoopHimme(l)blau: an architectural manifesto asserting that architecture is the central element in the urban fabric of large cities. A comment from CoopHimme(l)blau’s monograph applies also here: The analogy with animal forms shapes the basis of some projects of the group. (…) it formulates a form of credibility and a new force. [iii] Tokyo is not Vienna but this manifesto-building stands as an stiff punch in the face of the urban condition. Despite the banalisation of R.Venturi’s ideas into academic conventions and their wide dissemination into disparate branches of post-modernist architecture, it remains hazardous for an architect to attempt a literal manipulation of pop culture icons and symbols. The manga and B-movie “genes” visible in the College were and are still hard to digest for the architectural scene, whereas, paradoxically, the Japanese Pavilion for the 9th Venice Architectural Biennale was totally devoted to manga/otaku culture. Years after Watanabe’s gesture in Shibuya it is easier for Japanese architecture to institutionalize the manga world in the protected and ephemeral premises of the Giardini in Venice than to accept it as an architect’s signature in the Tokyo landscape. In parallel with such a work rooted firmly in the first part of his career, one sees Watanabe conducting a long and steady quest which is always free of any pedantic or arrogant side. This is characteristic also of his writings.

TEXTS ON A PRACTICE

Returning to the written and theoretical corpus of Watanabe, one observes something which remains rare today : a capacity to express in a clear and simple language complex notions and topics. This is most evident in Induction Design where the text about genetics, algorithmic computation, chance and necessity in design process is supported by unambiguous diagrams and lucid language. Unadorned by heavy intellectual references and quotations, his theoretical writing can be seen as almost doctrinal with an authoritative tone. In sum, Watanabe seems to endow his ideas with the same clarity as his designs. No decoration – which is not equivalent to “no ornament” – and no frills obscure his line of thought or his projects. He takes care to prevent misunderstandings and conceptual confusions that might otherwise arise from a superficial approach to his methods and principles : One misunderstanding to be avoided: the method here does not consist of using a computer to generate endless numbers of plans from which the best can then be selected. The Induction Cities program is designed to generate » good plans » automatically.

Well aware of his precedents on the path toward a scientific architecture, or at least toward an architecture based on the extensive use of reason, the architect of the engineering College in Shibuya recalls at some points the task started by Christopher Alexander with his patternlanguage. But Alexander lacked not only the computation tools required by his ideas but also the conceptual framework to incorporate the role of numbers and computation. Watanabe writes: “ We have at our disposal a new weapon.”

In defining sets of parameters in parallel with sets of values, Watanabe constructs a rationalist method which reserves nonetheless a place for emotion and beauty. Here, and perhaps only here, he owes much to the Modernist position. Born and educated in the XXth century and building for the XXIst century, Watanabe embraces two worlds. The Jelly Fish houses projects are impossible to imagine without the history of Mies’s glass houses and at the same time could in no way be designed before the last decade of the previous century. Indeed, these projects push to their limits the quest for a simultaneous autonomy of form, of tectonics and of function. The box and the blob are juxtaposed to produce a confrontation of antagonist systems.

TORN CURTAIN

In the Tsukuba express Railway Station, the dryness of the interior, which partially but not entirely reflects budget constraints, shows his determination to make very direct and strong choices during the design process. The façade expresses a moving, liquid effect appropriate for a station, otherwise lost in a nondescript environment. It creates an unmistakable identity within the monotonous blur of suburban Tokyo’s linear railway network. An experiment in “induction design,” this station marks at the same time a stop and a sign. A stop because here it is about trains that do stop between two other stations, a sign because each station must be recognized as such and identified as different from every other station on the line. In the cityscape, it stands out as an authentic “land-mark” for it gives direction, sense, content and even scale to a landscape which is otherwise quite ordinary.,

When seen on a misty cold and humid winter day, the « milk-like » concrete flows in the landscape like a phantom hidden under a bedsheet – if we permit ourselves an occasional metaphor, those metaphors which architects either fearfully avoid, or indulgently overuse — architectural discourse frequently dumbfounded by the irrepressible interplay between concepts and metaphors, this station is open to many interpretations. The smoothly undulating surface is sliced with very narrow horizontal slits acting as windows, giving a sort of Luciano Fontana’s canvas turned 90°. The end and beginning of the façade are just clear-cut sections, actually nothing finds nor defines an end or a beginning to this wall. Viewed from afar, trains just slip behind a sort of magical curtain standing alone in the fields and disappear; a torn curtain actually. How can a railway station, by its nature static, embody the notion of speed, without falling into mimicry ? Watanabe has an answer. The “concrete curtain” solution is remarkable for it conveys such a sense of speed. If fluidity has been a motto of contemporary architecture, here is the place where a cristalization of fluid has taken place. One is immediately drawn to touch the cream-white wall to verify its tactile character, its strength, heaviness, sound, tactile qualities.

The hard concrete sensation suddenly enters in a stunning contradiction with what the eyes have perceived. Not all sculpture, not all piece of art, and for that matter not all architecture, have that power to ask for a tactile intercourse. It could be just the right place to post a “Please touch” sign. A jelly condition is at work again in this work of Watanabe, years after he named several of his house projects Jelly Fish.In retrospect, Watanabe’s interest in fluidity through the model of the jellyfish proves to have been highly prescient. No wonder one of the critics writing on “Metamorphosis “ in the catalogue of the 9th Venice Biennale in 2004 marked some interest in the jellyfish : “(…)the communion of medusae, artist and scientist strikes at conventional aesthetics, especially sculptural. (…) jellyfish embody contingency and interdependence, announcing the reciprocity of our relations as living creatures with the stuff in which we survive. (…) All the lightness makes them a sculptor’s paradox: sculpture here has done with the column and the skeleton, the scaffold and the rock.”([iv])

Exploring contemporary Japanese culture, some trails emerge leading to the “jelly.” We can also borrow from contemporary writing in the cyber science fiction domain. The hero of one of Bruce Sterling’s best short stories is a technoscientific nerd who develops weird artificial jellyfishes in his own house : “Imitating nature to the core, Tug found a way to evolve and improve his vortex sheet models via genetic programming. Tug’s artificial jellyfish algorithms competed, mutated, reproduced, and died inside the virtual reality of his workstation’s sea-green screen. The recent, crowning step of Tug’s investigations was his manufacturing breakthrough. His theoretical equations had become actual piezoplastic constructions – soft, watery, gelatinous robot jellies of real plastic in the real world.” [v] The atmosphere depicted by the American novelist is strangely very close to the mood produced by Watanabe’s most experimental works. It is as if both artists, the architect and the techno buff novelist are swimming in the same waters, immersed in the same contemporary digital osmotic field of thought. Both register the numerical zeitgeist which every day impinges more and more tightly on us. In any case, the fusion of computation and reality will become increasingly central in architecture’s destiny. The day is steadily nearing when the digital design can immediately produce the specified physical output. In the process, the architect will regain much of the control he/she had lost in the construction process.

By giving a symbolic “Jellyfish” space to part of a house, Watanabe acknowledges the paradoxical condition in which any house project is trapped. The simultaneous play between the mechanics-artifact and the nature-jellyfish paradigms is that of a dialectic which can be found in every work by Watanabe. The Jelly Fish houses express with utmost force the opposite qualities of softness (the jelly bubbles) and hardness of transparency and opacity of orthogonal geometry and curved topological geometry. Against the countless contemporary projects propagandizing the “jelly” qualities which computer graphics enable less gifted architects to pretend to master, Watanabe’s deep command of computer tools in the realization of his creative vision offers a compelling contrast. Two opposing attitudes towards the fold/blob model are recognizable now that we have roughly a decade of distance: one which follows a rigorous architectural trajectory paralleling the evolution of engineering and materials science, and another which seems primarily enslaved by whims of opportunistic style-zapping. In Tokyo, Watanabe is able to transcends both categories.

This is really at work in his Tokyo House where fluid and wavelike textures and patterns are introduced on precise components of the three spaces layered house. The thematic of water finds its way here and there with a glossy shine, sometimes deep black, other times all white, everytime reminiscent of hydrodynamics.

Another longstanding avenue of exploration for Watanabe is in the potential of thin, linear and tall structures assembled in dense groupings. Either those structures are meant to stay static, or they can float and move depending on wind conditions. An example of the first model, the Shin Minamata Mon gate (2003-04) was an outdoor experiment based on the principles of the indoor and underground artificial branching system (Web Frame) used for the Iidabashi Station. Outside the K-Museum, his field of fibers initiated a series of experiments with the second model.

These models will undoubtedly be refined from project to project. With multiple and changing configurations, the problem of surfaces and envelopes, on which the best contemporary architecture has been focusing, is displaced and reinterpreted. Forests of vertical steel strings floating and swinging in the wind materialize an enclosure as in the Fiber Tower (2004), or can be walked through as in the Fiber Wave II installation. The CoCoon project (2005), explicitly develops branching and tree-like growth through computational processes. Here, it is as if the wind turned into a tempest. The tower is a large-scale arrangement of irregular fibers creating a complex nest condition. At the summit, real trees will grow high in the sky. Thus artificial branches will protect natural branches from any unwanted wind. This scheme redefines what an urban tower can become. It is noteworthy that as early as 1995 Watanabe had integrated the wind as a project parameter, when he designed the “Wind-God City” project, designing an optimal city for wind using the Generated City Blocks computer program.

It is striking to see how, in Shanghai, on a different scale, but still in an urban environment, Watanabe finds a convincing way to condense the spatial qualities he is aiming at. The Shanghai House (2004) deploys the entire range of eerie floating and levitating atmospheres that infuse all his work.

The amazing photograph of a housing block built in Havana by the Americans in the 1950s was published in 2000 in a fashion magazine.1 At first sight, this 30-storey « low-rise » seems unfinished and neglected, but there’s nothing to stop you thinking that it was fully occupied when the photo was snapped. With its phoney Sarajevo or Beirut look, this block has a monumental quality, designed, as it was, contrary to common sense, and at the same time with scrupulous respect for a functionalism taken to its limit. This apocalyptic or ruins-of-war vision only seems available for hypothetical « shoots » of models clad in international designer clothes. This housing « for human beings » programme, if we can so put it, is an object that is perfectly static and statistical alike. As the product of a capitalist promotion, it might just as well have been built by Castro’s communist government. It proposes the erasure and eradication of all individuality, and the putting behind bars and three-dimensional gates of all the residents’ uniqueness. The repeated arguments which predict the end of models, by pinpointing their obvious vacuousness don’t change a thing: such housing programmes are being built every day, here, there and everywhere, from Shanghai to what remains of the Costa Brava and the French Riviera. Yet contemporary changes are put under the aegis of networks and flows, plasticity and mobility, and the smooth and nomadic, but not on fixedness and changelessness.

One of the shrewdest examples of the rhetoric of flows, and one of the most extremist introductions of the world’s constant state of flux–encompassing land, people, genes, languages, standards, institutions and history–has been offered by Manuel de Landa,2 who, in an explicit Deleuze-inspired association, highlights an absolute form of evolutionism. This triumph of flow/flux-related thinking goes hand-in-glove with a very special attention afforded the phenomenon of « real time », plunging and fixing us in an eternal present from which any past and future are excluded. Thirty years after Michel Serres’ « Hermès » series, it has become almost commonplace and statutory to envisage land and urban development from the angle of the generalized, uninterrupted and fluid movement of all things. Architecture may indeed represent, a priori, the materialization in space of projects in which men and woman can reside and live, but the gap between this definition of the discipline and a conception of the world in terms of communication, interference, expression and distribution is growing ever wider.3

Oddly, the geological argument developed by M. de Landa tallies with an historical period when the frequency of earthquakes and other seismic goings-on involving disasters in urban areas has become particularly marked. Land and soil give way, as does history. Those metropolises that have seen fit to turn a blind eye to the geologies upon which they have been developing are subject to fatal calls to order–or rather, disorder–while climatology has lost the few certainties still attaching to it. Housing and dwelling are not even synonymous any more with terrestrial base. The only anti-seismic features of differing forms of architecture are their physical structures, with all the other components remaining at the mercy of the ever-increasing implosion of life-styles and social practices, under the pressure of that much-talked-about phenomenon, globalization. And, as a discipline, architecture is quite close to having lost its foundations, both literally and figuratively. Because it is a matter of merging architecture in the ambient chaotic state–chaos here being intended not in the ordinary accepted sense of the term–, the quest for the « right form » occurs today in relation to anything that opens up the possibility of a fluid mechanics put into general use. By the yardstick of this evolutiveness/flexibility that is being sought everywhere as a panacea, three themes can be inter-linked: pragmatism as a project attitude and position, adaptation complying with uses that cannot possibly be anticipated, and form understood as process.

Pragmatism has been so brandished as a banner by architects for a whole decade, starting with the Netherlands, then having conquered Spain, and lastly France, that it acts as an ideology-based ideology, and a doctrine-based doctrine. After all, save when the term is used as a stand-in for the crudest forms of cynicism and commercial opportunism, the pragmatic requirement has little chance of abandoning the architect with the least awareness of what he is up to(4). Designing and constructing the space of new and unknown social practices, which are being permanently reconfigured, should not, for all that, pass for a revolution. And yet all the conditions are in place to turn this architectural programme into an almost unachievable goal. We might well suppose that, these days, immersion in all manner of flow and flux is henceforth something that is shared by all those involved with architecture and matters urban. The fact is, though, that the very opposite actually takes places in many instances. Without even dwelling on the massive uptake of identity-related arguments, it is quite enough to see the extent to which an unaltered conception of housing–the abode–may endure, not only in the most popular representations but also among the so-called economic, political, scientific, university, and even artistic elites. The only thing that differs is the scale of things and costs entailed by access to those commodities called the house, the land about it, and its furnishings. The resistance and the unaffected success of the « cottage-style » residential model in the imagination of all social classes, at every latitude and in every continent gives us pause for thought. At the same time, we can see the nagging concern over « patrimonializing » a maximum number of objects, from the smallest building to public places or what remains of them, being associated, in a perverse way, with the ability to destroy the slightest trace of ordinary, invisible, common architecture.5 As far as France is concerned, we can now be sure that the building permit has become one of the most important factors of architectural mediocrity, with aesthetic censorship pouncing on architecturally-loaded projects, and invariably offering carte blanche to the worst horrors.6 It is really beginning to be time that it–the permit–was reformed, not to say done away with altogether, if we really want there to be proper experiments worthy of this name in the realm of housing.

Representations of the famous robotized dwelling (in France, for a few years, people used the word « domotique/home automation » to describe the integral wiring of the abode) in the press never strayed one inch from this model. Better still, each one of these repre-sentations did its utmost to put the array of traditional home and housing codes back in proper order, the better to exacerbate the new technological components. On the rare occasions when representational tests of the « house of the future » strive to thus project an envelope of the « future », the most hackneyed (and dated) science-fiction models have come to the fore: from the spherical house that is still less striking than the « Maison des gardes agricoles » designed by Etienne Louis Ledoux in the late 18th century, to the unlikely glass bubbles, the unassumed back-to-the-future ill-conceals the absence of any criticism of the one-family residential model, whose suburban American version was so masterfully depicted by Tim Burton in Edward Scissorhands.7 A painstaking collection of these projects confirms the extreme stability of this icon, made up of just a few signs (ridge roof, rectangular rooms, French-style windows, fireplace). So, flows, multiplicities, for everything one would want, but for the house it will be necessary to rely on the greatest symbolic immobility and on the greatest resistances. Too often, in places seeing themselves as highly experimental with regard to the redefinition of the household space, we still come across certain desperate contortions to pass for a radical newness the envelopes wrapping the eternal sequence « hallway-living room-bedrooms–technical rooms » in a pseudo-mix-up quickly given away by the prosaic (or pragmatic?), easily identifiable presence of props as recognizable as a bath tub, a kitchen sink, a toilet basin. The feeling of unfinishedness still prevails before the results of competitions such as « the virtual house » which replace the programme of the late « House of the year 2000″ that has become impossible, but still is included here and there in the greatest innocence.

Undeniably, in such a context of absurd housing standardization, the projects and works of the Dutch MVRDV, in direct and clear association with OMA, represent an important stage in an eventual transformation of architectural practices and project management. In a complete change of tack, by taking it literally and pushing it to its extreme limit, the normative apparatus had been the appropriate strategy. Open to anyone to analyze their work as a hyperfunctionalism, which in some respects it is, collective housing architecture would not be the same after them. The sad clones of their building with its disproportionate cantilevers in Amsterdam (The Cantilever, building for the elderly, Amsterdam-Osdorp, 1997) which are already appearing are definitely not the best lesson to be drawn from their work. On the other hand, whenever the logic of producing a building is turned into an opportunity to construct something quite different than the thing expected, a breach is opened up in the thick wall of conventions.

If the combined impulses of withdrawal into household pseudo-inwardness (the famous cocooning) on the one hand, and ceaseless roaming (journeys and trips beyond the place of residence, and surfing Internet networks) on the other, do not, in the end, produce as many contradictions as one might have imagined, this is because the physical reference of the dwelling hardly changes at all. The incorporation of the most sophisticated means of communication within the « living environment », to borrow an expression which nicely betrays its semantic clumsiness, and is now happily running out of steam, does not seem to upset a whole lot. Only contrite aesthetes lament the acoustic and visual nuisance of the cell phone which blends as easily in the sourest of settings as jeans managed to do in their day.

We shall keep an even closer eye on the observations which Medhi Belhaj Kacem, author of L’Esthétique du chaos, makes about contemporary conditions. As an expert, if ever there was, on nomadological wanderings through the most pregnant symptoms of contemporaneousness, MBK specifically describes a future that is actually already here, where the lack of anything better to do reigns supreme: « [...]in the centuries to come, work will no longer be understood in the sense of laborious labour (labour is no longer that of slavery, subjugation, discipline or even control, so it is no longer that of fear, but of inactivity, [...], encompassing boredom, in a word, angst: no longer of the traumatic death of war or the person martyrological exploited by work, but the depressed and suicidal aspect of being at a loose end and pacification through bio-control at point blank range).. (…).8 This is the kind of extra-lucid argument that architects would do well to listen to before serving up naive fictions about a kind of housing that might spare its occupants this kind of depressing situation. For what is and what will be the subject of the house? A subject entirely constructed from prosthesis whose affects themselves are downloaded from the system of networks. Trying to design the abode of such a being will not necessarily be a very stimulating project. The research carried out by a busy minority of architects thus risks no longer finding any meaning if the prototype of the Havana building turns out, after the event, to be the horizon of the human condition. To give the lie to such a sinister vision is the task being faced, each one in its own way, by the projects emerging in 2001. By stoutly repudiating the idea of the house of the future, we gain nowadays the possibility of producing, in concrete terms, day by day, dwellings striving for the fulfilment of the least fantastical expectations, and thereby, paradoxically, the most bearers of a destabilization of architectural and social codes that are rarely questioned.

NOTES

1.The Foxa building, reportage « Techno Vista Social Club » published in Jalouse nº35, November 2000, p.84, Michel Figuet photographer.There is henceforth more material for architects in the plentiful fashion press than in the meagre offerings of publications specializing in architecture, at least the lack of critical and theoretical writings in them causes less of a problem.

4. Cf. the conference « Things in the Making: Contemporary Architecture and the Pragmatist Imagination » at the MoMA (New York, November 2000, where we sketched the boundaries of the dyed-in-the-wool introduction of the idea of « pragmatism » into the realm of architecture.

GIRARD (Christian).- French architects say “Basta to theory” and are proud of it. One or two ways out of this trap, in : ANY, n° 25-26, Being Manfredo Tafuri , ANY Corp, New York, March 2000, pp. 6-7

FRENCH ARCHITECTS SAY “BASTA TO THEORY” AND ARE PROUD OF IT. ONE OR TWO WAYS OUT OF THIS TRAP

Bring together, in June 1999, Anthony Vidler, Rosalind Krauss, Elizabeth Grosz, Hubert Damisch, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi,Denis Hollier, Ignaci de Sola Morales, Saskia Sassen, Arata Isosaki, Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn…and a dozen French achitects to discuss architectural thinking. And enjoy, or this is what you would expect. By and large, the very essence of the ANY conference series is to locate each year in a different country and different metropolises a debate and forum of the highest level possible in terms of architectural thinking. This particular convergence of localism (nationalism when ANY takes place in a capital city: Buenos-Ares, Paris; regionalism otherwise: Barcelona, Los Angeles) makes ANY a worthwile enterprise with no equivalent. In either cases, the reunion of a core of international architects known for their effective theoretical work and philosophers, art historians, critics with local architects ignites pertinent questionings and explorations in the realm of architecture as a discipline at the same time autonomous and in a position of exchange with other disciplines.This is exactly what did not occur in Paris. The “national issue” can seem rather awkward in those cultural matters but remains always powerfully attached or imbedded in events like exhibitions held by institutions like the MoMa, Beaubourg, the Guggenheim, a.s.o., and through publications (including, first among them, the catalogues of those exhibitions), to say anything of explicitely international trade shows as the Venice Biennial. The Director of l’IFA (Institut francais d’architecture), host of the Paris ANY conference, himself observed to Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (also lecturers in the ANYMORE conference) in issue No 89 of October : “(…) whatever other conceptual and critical issues there might be, national patterns also exist.” [1] Indeed, national patterns exist to the extent there is some kind of worldwide market struggle among architectural firms, specifically to land commissions for public works through international design competitions.Globalization is another word for transnational capitalism at the same time it induces very strong inter-local antagonisms.

In regard to this background, if ANY conference can be seen as a testing device to measure the degree of theoretical awareness and productivity of a local architectural scene, we have to admit that the stop-over in the pompous Chaillot building was, on this point of view, a shameful experience we would prefer to forget as soon as possible. To forget.. or to remember only in us much this event had the merit of showing that the king is nude and, perhaps, of obliging us to make more efforts in shaking the micro-provincial French architectural milieu. Can we find some way out of such anti-intellectual mood which has been dominating our peers from the practice to the schools of architecture in France since the end of the seventies ?

The poor state of the architectural discipline in France is a fairly well known fact, but an occasion to measure the weakness, in terms of theoretical and critical level, of French architecture was given by the ANYMORE conference held in Paris. For sure, the conference had obviously other goals and ambitions than to assess this depressing condition of the trade in that particular location, i.e.: a country that has benefited in the two last decades from a remarkable renewal of its architectural productions, mainly through a government impulsion. However, at least for us, ANYMORE will remain as this unbelievable event where it was “officially” said, by the French architects [and one engineer-architect ] from the panel that “ theory is of no avail” to them, be it architects known internationally like Dominique Perrault [President of the IFA, the “official” speaker for the trade ],or on the local scene like Patrick Berger,Marc Mimram, or even, alas, the young crowd of the emerging architects on the pre-conference panel. As one of the latter was able to recognize, certainly through his intern/extern position as an Anglo-Saxon practicing here, but educated abroad: “There is an anti-theorist context in France” [Brendane Mac Farlane]. As a methodological hypothesis, we will assume that the organization of the conference, whether its leading promoter or the Parisian host [l’IFA] has selected a fairly representative segment of the meaningful architects presently practicing in the country: the aforementioned all display a body of work interesting enough and, for most, that can bare comparison with anything worth of an international reputation. The absence of de Portzamparc was certainly regretful to the extent he has never been heard scorning theoretical endeavors and is literate in contemporary debates. Virilio’s no-show, for war reasons (Kosovo), was even more regretful since he remains one of the few if not one of the last critics of the local scene able to sustain a discussion in the terms layed out by the ANY project : annual conferences “in which leading thinkers in architecture and related fields such as history, art, philosophy,and science come together for a multicultural and multidisciplinary discussion on particular ideas related to architecture.”

It is as if the architectural milieu had decided to promote a reverse kind of the “exception francaise” defended by the government in other cultural realms (cinema,television,literature): the less intellectualized the better. All the French architects on the different panels, except Bernard Cache, answered to the quest for theoretical debate with a “fin de recevoir”. The engineer and architect Marc Mimram was very straightforward in his will to escape any kind of thinking endeavour related to his practice by pointing out that all he cared for was the practical and material aspects of his projects. His slideshow focussed on mining sites, on steel workshop activities, on construction processes. There was no hint to him that the concept of the material needs to be constructed. Hopefully, Bernard Cache, who lectured just before on the same Anymore Technology panel, objected. Such a condition needs to be elaborated on if one wants to address two sets of questions :

1/ at a time of globalization and one would presume of a world dissemination of intellectual debates, how can it be possible that a country remains so untouched by any of the questions and researches being held in other places? France, it is a common formula which is verified everyday since thirty years, is said to have the most stupid right-wing political class in the world: does it also have the most stupid architects? Eventually not. But the parallel might not prove to be as clumsy as it sounds, for the socialist years under Mitterand’s presidency were, paradoxically, synchronous with the survival of France’s potent archconservatism in many cultural fields. And to say nothing of the degradation of democratic values and attitudes during that same period. By what mysterious process have we become “hors champ”, or ‘out of the game’, in respect to what is discussed by architects in Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Rotterdam, London, Ankara, Vienna, Seoul ?

To try to answer those questions is a first pretext to open even more the wound. Of course, to add to the grim situation is the often-quoted fact that French philosophy and theory has been the main purveyor of concepts to the field of architecture for the last two decades. It is always remarkable to see how fluent with Deleuze and Derrida are the Spanish, American, Dutch, architects lecturing in different schools, or writing in Quaderns, AAFiles, Assemblage, Archis,Any,to select a few.The only instance when so-called “French theory” was brought up by local architects was in the opening sequence of the long video-clip conceived and presented by Frederic Nantois and Fiona Meadows : it was no more, but at least no less, than a visual name-dropping of the thinkers that are read everywhere but in Paris. This montage exemplified the position held here : thank you Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze… we do not need you anymore. Or just as captions, logos, and gimmicks. Or in a pseudo jargonish rhizomatic mimetic mode as in the Francois Roche’s lecture. Ironically, in a move to save the appeareances, a local sociologist in the audience claimed that all the young architects of the first panel at least “theorized their practice”, which evidentely they were absolutely not willing to do nor doing.

2/ How far and to what extent the present condition of the architectural discipline in France has regressed to what can be rigorously called a Beaux-Arts one?

The IFA Director himself is well aware of this but did not (could not) bring it up during the conference : “there has been a return to the Beaux-Arts repressed which is also a return of a gestural attitude and at a same time a rejection of a certain intellectual complexity. And I think that this is very clear in the work of Dominique Perrault, which is very well built but at the same time is based on a position which could sound like “Basta with complexity ! Back to crystals” (…) Most of his projects are simplified, neo-neo Platonic symbols” [2]. This statement is fully adequate in the sense that it considers the Beaux-Art drive not only as one that gives precedence to form but that also exclude complexity and any kind of complex thinking and any kind of thinking the complexity.Where do we go now,once this bas been fully acknowledged ?

There is a combination of a return to the Beaux-Arts and “the Minimal art effect on architecture”: on one hand architecture research has been deciphering and exploring the issues of complex environments and design process, while, simultaneously, on the other hand an architectural production claiming links with the Minimal art sphere. After the Tendenza episode of the 70’s and in the wake of a constellation of works that go,in short, from Tadao Ando to Herzog & de Meuron and Peter Zumthor,many an architect claims to be working in a “minimal” general framework. At the Paris ANYMORE conference, on the panel of “emerging” young architects this was the case of the team formed by, Anne Lacaton & Jean-Pierre Vassal. Presenting the much published Maison Latapie house (shown in the Guggenheim in Soho /Beaubourg exhibition Premises in winter 98-99)[3], Vassal remained as unutterable as the few short texts they have written on architecture. On the next day, his eldery pair, Berger would be as mute when presenting his UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland,incidentally also selected in the Premises exhibition.The aphasic quality of Berger’s architecture is equaled by it’s aphasic presentation: a square-footage figure as an introduction, a few slides, a few descriptive and deceptive words for each slide, and a bashing conclusion: “the rest, it is useless” [“le reste, a quoi ca sert ? “] the rest standing for any kind of intellectualization of the design process and of the designed object. “Circulez, il n’y a rien a voir” to use a colloquial expression.The Minimal is too often acompaigned by a minimal service paid to theory, when not a rejection of it… in the name of an artistic practice.

By chance, a stimulating event took place in Orleans two months before the ANYMORE conference: the Archilab first exhibition introduced in France at last the works of Greg Lynn, Jesse Reiser, Aymptote, Neil Denari, with dutch MVRDV, austrian Pau Hof, japanese Shiru Ban, Sejima, and a score of talents including French architects.The curators Marie-Ange Brayer and Frederic Migayrou offered a remarkable occasion to wakeup the so provincial French milieu.Now, it is a too banal critical mistake to charge with “formalism” the works shown in Archilab. Curiously the IFA director, albeit an historian, addresses such a critic to Migayrou. [4] Reporting here this attitude helps to map the context in which the ANY conference was trapped into when landing in Paris. If we add that a radio show aired a month after the conference had for topic the American-Japanese connection in the making of the Any series, we will measure how incomprehensible and even hostile to intellectual ventures the French scene has decided to remain. [5]

A clear symptom of any tendency to a beaux-artization is the return of such a non-conceptual rhetoric as “emotion”.Moreover, to hear in 1999 that “emotionbypasses the intellect” is such anachronic that one feels sorry for the architect that proffers it.« Emotional Rescue » was the title of a Rolling Stones song: it could be a sum up of what we heard from the French architects. We had spotted elsewhere the ‘emotional’ bend of the young generation of French architects in one of the rare printed attempt to open a theoretical debate here: “L’architecture, en theorie” [Revue d’Esthetique 1996].[6] The publication however landed in a desert and was not sufficient to have any effect on the milieu, as the ANYMORE conference has proved.Now, the crude and simplistic “emotion versus rational” attitude is something that curiously comes up here and there even where it is not expected. See for instance Ben van Berkel’s own “Dear reader” in ANYHOW (Rotterdam, 1997):”Do you have to read the book or be emotionally overwhelmed by the building to know where architecture is?”[7]It is most of the time the emotion of the material that is praised by its postponents. Back to the cinematheque’s conference auditorium, we can recall at least two signs of an existing area of theoretical work in the parisian milieu, I name Bernard Cache and Mark Goulthorpe.Both delivered meanimgful discourses bringing up questions related to their own theoretical agendas.

[3] see the catalogue of the Premises exhibition, in particular Abram’s relation of post-war french architecture, where theory as such is never documented.Joseph Abram, “Political Will and the Cultural Identity Crisis in Late-Twentieth –Century French Architecture”, in Premises : Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design from France 1958-1998, exhibition catalogue (New York : The Solomom Guggenheim Foundation, 1998).

[4] Cohen specifically states to Bois, Hollier and Krauss : “ The attraction of some French architects to glass boxes, to prismatic buildings, their attraction to glass as such , also has to do with a certain interest in Minimal art. In a way this formalistic bent is legitimized by critics like Frederic Migayrou who has developed the collection of the FRAC Centre in Orleans and is busy collecting architecture of the 60’s. (…) Migayrou has a certain nostalgia for the for;alistic approach of the French avant-garde group – much lees complex than Archigram and much less stimulating in a way.” (op.cit. p.10) A singular configuration is happening with the triangle of three antagonistic curators : Cohen (Ifa)/Guiheux(Beaubourg)/ Migayrou (Frac Orleans) engaged in a competition to build the best collection of architecture possible. When the purchase – with public funds – of models by contemporary architects becomes a game of power, the risk is to see, here also, theoretical issues left early on the road.

[5] France Culture,(French public service cultural radio network) Permis de Construire air show, Monday the 28th of July 1999, as advertised in the IFA monthly Bulletin, Jean Louis Cohen, Jean Attali, on ANY.

[8] Dans October Cohen dit à Bois, Hollier and Krauss : « The attraction of some French architects to glass boxes, to prismatic buildings, their attraction to glass as such , also has to do with a certain interest in Minimal art. In a way this formalistic bent is legitimized by critics like Frederic Migayrou who has developed the collection of the FRAC Centre in Orleans and is busy collecting architecture of the 60s. (…) Migayrou has a certain nostalgia for the for;alistic approach of the French avant-garde group much lees complex than Archigram and much less stimulating in a way. » (op.cit. p.10)

[1] Eisenman prononça ces mots dans une conférence à Chicago à propos de sa collaboration avec Jacques Derrida : « (Derrida) said things to me that filled me with horror : « how can it be a garden without plants ? » » Where are the trees? » » Where are the benches for people to sit on ? » This is what philosophers want, they want to know where the benches are. » cité par Jeffrey Kipnis in « Twisting the separatrix », publié in : Chora L Work (cf.note 3).

Nowadays architecture is a very insecure discipline. Its search for legitimacy is so compelling that it has brought it into the vicinity of philosophy.[1] The number of texts that have been published in this domain does not contradict the fact that a critical epistemology of architecture remains a task to be attempted. After two decades that have seen the architectural field crisscrossed by different sociological, linguistic and semiological approaches, the eighties will be remembered as a period when some architects have turned towards philosophy. Moreover, it is also a decade when at last philosophy came to put architecture under scrutiny wearing neither the lenses of traditional aesthetics nor of art history.

For better or for worse, a specific philosophical body of work, namely « deconstruction », has been willing and to some extent, able to establish a connection with the architectural realm. Or what could be taken as a junction if compared to the previous state of mutual ignorance in which the two practices carefully remained. A handful of architectural critics and historians did refer to philosophical works – C.Rowe, A. Colquhoun or M. Tafuri, to name only some of the foremost – but in doing so they never pretended to cross the borders and stayed in the known boundaries of the historiography, theory and criticism of architecture.

Even though I accept Richard Rorty’s arguments concerning « the demise of foundational epistemology », a « nonepistemological sort of philosophy » can be elaborated as Kuhn, Dewey, Sellars and Feyerabend have shown, « one which gives up any hope of the transcendental » [2], it is none the less convenient to keep the notion of epistemology for two reasons: in the first place it prevents us from exploring the rather vague territory of ‘philosophy and architecture’ and secondly it is one of the most productive areas of thinking today, thanks to the development of what can be roughly labelled a post-structuralist epistemology or a non-positivist epistemology. If the legitimacy of architecture is a question that arises with great regularity, it is only recently that architects and historians or critics have tried to answer by analysing concepts. The very idea of ‘concept’ has been fashionable in architecture ever since the end of the seventies. Today, every architect uses his or her own brand of conceptualization and there are very few who do not claim at least one concept behind their projects. There is a reactivation of the power of words which has little to do with the earlier practice in which architecture borrowed discourses from sociology, semiology, linguistics and psycho-analysis. The discourses now being held are no longer meant to give a posteriori explanations to the works of architecture: they support the design process from beginning to end. Or this is what we are told. However, it is true that more and more architects have conceptual pretensions out of keeping with the theoretical means they give themselves to achieve such conceptualization. Architects have increasingly tended to believe that the more they would import concepts from other fields the more their practice would gain recognition. Such a quest is useless. Indeed, the types of relationship that architecture may develop with different branches of contemporary knowledge bear witness in their own way to the impossibility of a general epistemology. Not only has the question of the capacity of architecture to reach an objective positive self-awareness become pointless, it should no longer be raised. The point is to have architectural theory released from positive schemata as well as from constantly calling upon or resorting to the ideology of reconciling art and science. What could a theory of architecture be when global knowledge together with a universal epistemology of knowledge has gone ? It would be a discourse produced in such a way that it both takes into account the ‘nomadic’ character of the concepts it uses and gives up any operational goal in the design process. In other words, a theory of architecture has nothing in common with what is meant by a science or by scientific knowledge. It cannot correspond to a scientific knowledge of the discipline nor can it claim architectural practice as its direct goal. This is why we prefer to speak of the indisciplined nature of architecture.

What is to be understood by the idea of the nomadic character of concepts ? Far from being able to constitute a closed conceptual system meeting the positivist criterions of scientificity, the conceptual entities developed by any theory – be it architectural or other – remain scattered and always liable to become metaphoric. They keep infringing on extra-linguistic grounds, getting entangled with affects, drives, materials which do not obey the so-called ‘rules’ of language and do not form a system. In such conditions a theory of architecture can neither describe nor systematise, translate, reproduce or explain the architectural design process. Pure instrumentality becomes impossible.

From this standpoint, the only distinction that can be made between a theory of architecture and a doctrine would have to be found in its attitude towards its own object and its own tools. The theory (or rather, what would stand as a theory) would then be a recognition of metaphor-concepts,[3] of their autonomy from any ruling or organizing system still grounded in the postulates of classical episteme or those of modernity. As regards the corresponding doctrine, it would result from implementing these nomadic concepts, even consciously, without ever definitively accepting their incapacity to enter into a system or to be systematized. The theory would then have an ironic attitude and the doctrine would be tinged with blindness. In all cases, the difference would never lie in different degrees of scientificity. By playing with nomadic concepts, architectural thinking succeeds in becoming autonomous while interpreting parts of disciplines or even whole disciplines as V. Gregotti did with the notion of geography .

The hypothesis of nomadic concepts does not provide a reading grid for architecture and does not even offer a convenient tool for its analysis. On the contrary, it suggests that grids are of no avail. Architecture refuses to have such systems applied to it. All the efforts to promote a reading of architecture or an architecture as text are nothing more than the enactment of a grid fantasm. Any architectural design involves at times intense rationalization but it also needs to draw such a number of relationships and correspondences between heterogenous or definitively incongruous elements, that it eludes any attempt at imposing a systematic or structural hold on it. Contrarily to what can often be read, the design process cannot be compared to synthetizing elements of knowledge called upon by the architect: such an idealistic view is akin to a myth. Nomadic concepts do not produce a synthesis: they only make it possible, in a transient way, punctually, for heterogenous levels of reality to combine with each other, to conglomerate, into new dimensions or plateau [4] to use the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari. It is the case with the concept of type which during the last two decades allowed a convergence of the socio-economic and formal aspects of architecture.

From a rational and, to some extent, operative concept, « type » drifted towards less firm grounds: « type became not merely a method of taxonomic analysis – no longer simply a continuation of nineteenth century natural science – but a poetic. » [5] With the notion of poetic we entera province foreign to epistemological enquiries.

There is another consequence to these propositions. The common analogy between architecture and language which has been condemned as unscientific, viewed from that new angle, seems quite innocent. It must be exempted from any normative evaluation. The linguistic analogy can have its origin in local, punctual, infinitisimal movements, it can appear under the cover of nomadic concepts and, in that case, according to what we have just suggested, still be theoretically valid. In this respect, Charles Jencks’ work, which has been generally overlooked by theoreticians of architecture, could in fact be seen as one of the last possible forms of theoretical activity in architecture. This claim will work to distort the commonly accepted meaning of theoretical activity. Thanks to his constant production of labels, coined words, verbal creations, Jencks shows he has recognized the irretrievable nomadic character of concepts in architecture and the flexibility which belongs to them. Finally, the idea of post-modernism can stand as a perfect prototype of a nomadic concept. It’s a concept impossible to locate and this is why it succeeded so well, beyond the dreams of its promoter. Needless to say deconstruction is another good example of nomadic concept.

There is a very special architectural criticism tool which is questioned by what is described under the name of nomadic concepts: the notion of metaphor. It seems that architectural historians and critics will never cease to use this concept without ever discussing it, or to rarely. There is no stronger example of its overwhelming strength than the way it has replaced, in the language of the critic, the banished notion of style as a stereotype, used and abused. On this matter, Jencks’ approach has indeed been anything but rigourous: despite his long time interest in rhetorics and semiology, he has alwayskept a simplistic stand on metaphor.[6]

In the twenties, Le Corbusier drew a section of an oceanliner which happened to be the Titanic. Later he also drew the deck of the oceanship which was taking him to South-America and wrote on his perspective sketch: « pour l’immeuble d’Alger = excellent/ rechercher les coupes du paquebot’ (‘for the Algiers building = excellent, find the section drawings of the oceanliner). » As is well known, Le Corbusier’s designs were often given the taste or flavour of an ocean liner. For most of the critics up to now [7] this is nothing more than an another example of metaphoric elaboration in the architectural field. Not only this linguistic analogy has all the failures of any linguistic analogies and, at the same time, its sheer innocence; but it is of little help to grasp what was at stake in Le Corbusier’s work. Incidentally, there are hardly any portholes to be found in his complete work. He has designed with naval vessels in mind, yet his projects never fell into the style paquebot , or into the streamlined fashion.

What needs to be documented is the process by which something like an oceanlinerity (to use a provisional and, it must be admitted, inelegant, coinage) acts upon Le Corbusier’s mental universe. Memories, references, archetypes, sources of formal inspiration, can never be restricted to a simple linguistic analogy. Le Corbusier, but also Patout, Herbst, Mallet-Stevens in the thirties, or in the 70’s Richard Meier and a host of architects were undergoing a distinctly oceanship drive. They seemed to share some kind of deep move or affects with whatever is linked to oceanliners. Namely: the sea, the steam machines, the steel – its smoothness, its sound, its reflection – the bolts, the whole voyage mood, the idea of speed. All this combined in various ways represents the oceanlinerity and accounts for much more than a spatial image or configuration to be ‘metaphorically’ transferred to architecture. The liner (the object) is not a mere model to be initiated – contrary to usual interpretations – the liner (the word) is not a mere concept to shift according to Colqhoun’s argument, (see note 7) nor is it simply a metaphor. The liner (the word, the object) is the addition of all these operations within and outside language: it is a concept and a metaphor. It is an ecstatic body, a feeling, an affect, an ordering of multiple facets.

Reading Le Corbusier gives some hints on how such a complex alchemy can pervade the architect’s mental – and corporal – stock of references. It suffices to note how the mere word paquebot (oceanliner) is used, re-used and worked upon in Le Corbusier’s discourse (written or spoken). Verbalisation is one very effective means of transferring, carrying, diffusing, global environmental images. Thus, at one point, there exists and continue to exist, an oceanliner sensibility, yet it is not really a Zeitgeist: it is less than that, but perhaps more precise. A fixation on a formal condition, a mind setter, a nondescript fusion device. But it is not a reminiscence, not a bow to the past. A noun can be at the same time an ordinary everyday notion and an effective concept: through its different uses in architectural practice oceanship becomes a remarkable … conceptual tool.

The same indirect instrumental necessity leads architects like Louis Kahn to celebrate ‘Silence’ or ‘a building’s urge to come into being’, Vittorio Gregotti to speak of geography and territory or to endlessly repeat the notion of discipline in each of his Casabella editorials, as a refrain, and Peter Eisenman to comment, in his early works, upon the ‘deep structure’ and then to keep commenting from 1972 up to now on the architectural sign.[8]
At the risk of being repetitive, further emphasis needs to be placed on the use and practice of metaphor. It is most intriguing, for example, to see Derrida, one of the foremost contemporary analysts of metaphor, write: « Contrary to what it seems, deconstruction is not an architectural metaphor. The word should, it will name an architectural thought, an on-going thought. First it is not a metaphor. We don’t give any credit here to the concept of metaphor ».[9] If there were at least one single certainty about deconstruction, it would be that it is, in part, an architectural metaphor. More often than not, it is precisely nothing more than that: an architectural metaphor. No denial will do: no absolute purification of language from metaphors is possible. And, thanks to Derrida’s decisive insights, any will to oppose definitely metaphor and concept is just a step back into metaphysics. This is why the aphorism quoted above seems a serious discrepancy in Derrida’s thought as Christopher Norris has rightly noted in his interview with him. Things become even more surprising if we quote a conference where Derrida himself comments on « those typical moments when, using formulas one would be tempted to receive as metaphors, Heidegger points out that they are not ».[10] To negate any metaphorical presence in a text where metaphor remains evidently encapsulated is a ritual exercise continental philosophers often indulge in. For instance, the epistemological writings of Michel Serres are, to a certain point, made of this constant balance between a metaphorical discourse and a denial of any metaphor [11] It is no wonder therefore that his work has been progressively absorbed by its writing style and acclaimed as highly poetic. The problem is that as soon as a philosophy (or an epistemological endeavour) is accepted and treated in the poetical realm it often starts to loose much of its strength. The figure of denial has also become an easy cliché in architectural thinking. No one is fooled however, when reading, for example Mark Wigley, on Deconstruction: « The use of the formal vocabulary of Constructivism is therefore not a historical game… », « deconstructivist architecture does not constitute an avantgarde. » and of course « This is not a style » [12] to which we could oppose Magritte’s famous « This is not a pipe » painting. Philip Johnson sets the tone: « however delicious it would be to declare again a new style, that is not the case today. Deconstructivist architecture is not a new style.»[13] but the very fact of writing ‘deconstructivist architecture’ is not altogether innocent. And if « No generally persuasive -ism has appeared » what does an -ist stands for ? The play on the postfix is in itself interesting: deconstructivist, deconstructivism , and deconstructionist architecture have all been used here and there. We could add: have been phantasmed about and verbalised. To locate verbalisation within the architectural process as an element among others. side by side with the drafting activity, is far from enough. And sticking to the idea of an architectural text does not, finally, really pay tribute to the complex role play which is at stake. The word-making machineonce evoked by Kisho Kurokawa[14] seldom stops. Logocentrism is the unescapable horizon on which things must be observed.
The architectural text metaphor is indeed a reduction of the worst kind, for it represses all that would not fit in the flat unidimensional format. The concept and, of course, metaphor, of trace has been exactly and rightly proposed to avoid such crude reduction. From words to project and project to words, the drawing and drafting activity sets itself as an autonomous world of exploration. The « drawing as text » analogy raises more questions than it answers by reactivating a search for meaning when such a capture remains value-laden.

In this sense, an architect who experimented this idea of text in a radically different way than Eisenman was without any doubt Daniel Libeskind. The author of Chamber Works (1983) pushed the graphic experimentation to the point where he has no other comment than : it is a Not-Architecture.[15] Later on, Libeskind raised Eisenman textual phantasms far beyond its limits, bringing us back to the surrealists’ automatic writing: « Owerp. Ow erp, owerpower, pow er po werpower power » – and so on [16] Libeskind throws architecture into language instead of simulating a convergence between them. Any speech-act, any discourse, any text struggles with the logocentric attraction. Put down a word on a sheet of paper, pronounce a word: it is always a metaphor and it is always a concept. It is a metaphor-concept.

Andrew Benjamin’s [17] use of the concept of enactment pertains to what we are trying to argue here. An enactment needs or postulates a language inscription. Action, movement, motion, process, dynamism are provoked, initiated from within the language region (the logo-centre) towards its externality. In several texts, Benjamin’s writing firmly grasps its object of thought in terms of ‘enactment’. What else allows enactment than the metaphor-concepts, the nomadic concepts, the perpetual language glissandos … towards a centre at the same time as towards a radical periphery ?
In conclusion, therefore, it is the impossibility of writing outside the process of language – outside of language as a process – which entails that simple denial can never stem language power. Reworking architecture concepts as nomadism allows them to work outside the predetermined realm of metaphysics as well as the denial of that realm.

[1] In this respect, the fact that the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data classifies P. Eisenman’s Houses of cards, Oxford University Press, 1987, first under the heading ‘Philosophy’ is a remarkable accomplishment.

[3] Ch. Girard.-Architecture et Concepts Nomades. Traité d’Indiscipline (Bruxelles, Mardaga,1986) A year after our essay was published, the idea of ‘nomadic concepts’ has been transferred to the epistemological realm in a collective work edited by I. Stengers D’une Science à l’autre Des concepts nomades (Paris Le Seuil,1987) in this process, from architecture to epistemology, the very concept of ‘nomadic concept’ can be easily grasped.

[9] ‘Up to now’ means at least up to The House of Cards, published in 1987 where we read: ‘All building must support, shelter, enclose, allow access. Therefore in order to distinguish architecture from building there must be an intentional act. the form must evidence, or signify, an intention that is architectural. Therefore, at the most fundamental level, the distiction between building and architecture depends on the presence in the latter of a ‘sign of architecture’. P. Eisenman, Misreading, in: The House of Cards. Albeit his derridian (mis)readings, a strong metaphysic of the sign still pervades Eisenman’s thinking.

[16] D. Libeskind.- Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus, Folio 1, Architectural Association, 1983. With essays by P. Eisenman, K. Forster, J. Hejduk and A. Rossi. For an acurate review, see R. Evans: ‘In front of lines that leave nothing behind’, AA File No 6, May 1984, pp. 89-96. Evans gave also a seminal critique of Eisenman’s work where he insisted on the more than ambivalent role he confers to words; see: ‘Not for wrapping purposes‘ in AA File No 10, 1985, pp. 68-74

The suburbs and peripheries of our cities present us with an image of social chaos. Riots and latent guerilla warfare develop right beneath the eye of security cameras. By contrast, historical urban centres are turned into museum pieces. The Louvre, for example, can be read as a double investment: on the one hand it is part of a series of important recent works – the Republic’s ‘Grands Travaux’ – made up of heavy-handed gestures and pseudo-transparencies, as exemplified in the pyramid. On the other hand the museum is undergoing its own immaterial and universal distribution in multimedia, through the sale of the works displayed in it and visitors routes available on CD ROM. We can now witness simulacra that are even more impressive than those evoked in the most sombre prophesies of Virilio or Baudrillard: everything is reordered and reterritorialised, controlled by postindustrial capitalism. Capitalist authority is thus able to monopolize the latest theoretical developments, as has recently happened with the idea of complexity. Economics and politics meet complexity at the very moment they come up against their own failure. And the theme of complexity has rapidly spread into modes of thinking outside of the scientific field, since its rhetoric reveals a lack of intelligibility.

Meanwhile, architecture redevelops a capacity for creating work with an autonomy of its own. The fact that it borrows from other disciplines (even catastrophe theory to take one of the most recent examples) does not reduce its potential for producing self-relerential meaning and terms for its own use. On the contrary, the game of borrowing metaphors only serves to prove how easily the discipline is inclined towards other areas of knowledge. ‘All concepts belong to us, they are available and to hand,’ architects seem to say without the slightest inferiority complex. Architecture, trapped in the constraints of making, subject to contingencies and called upon to build, has the privilege of participating in its unique way towards the real. For ‘paper’ architecture, however crucial it may be, does not reduce the power of the purpose of acting, which is embodied by material construction in works of architecture. Above all, architectural design brings into play social, economic and technical factors which reflect reality. And today, the architectural project is capable of modelling and simulating all these factors together better than ever before.

It is not by chance that, repeating the experience of constructivism at the beginning of the century, what is now regarded as avant-garde architecture is attempting to force itself from the laws of gravity. As well as a fascination for fluid forms and anexact geometries comes the architect’s recurrent hope to invent new forms and to found a new architecture. Jeffrey Kipnis, in his text ‘Towards a New Architecture’, for example, interprets and redefines politically the question of newness in architecture whilst confirming the necessity of the architect to create new forms.1 The architects of today and tomorrow, who will be engaged with a project not only on the level of image to construction but also on the level of existential resingularisations, will be viewed as social actors with a principal role to play rather than heroes the Apollos in Democracy, to paraphrase Gropius.2 Their levels of intervention matter little as a house, apartments, a cultural centre, a local development or a centre of scientific research can and must become occasions of important design investment which is both singular and which emphasises singularity. For Guattari, the architect ‘can constitute an essential bridge at the heart of agencements of varied statements that are capable of taking on analytically and pragmatically the contemporary productions of subjectivity. ‘3

Since Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy ? something specific has changed in the relationship that architecture claimed to have established with philosophy some ten years ago. Namely, the discipline of architecture, already freed from every claim to constitute itself as a discipline of knowledge modelled on a scientific ideal, now finds itself in the situation of having to invent its own procedures of selfconceptualisation in order to act upon the world. Philosophy is handing back to other disciplines their responsibilities … as disciplines. For architects this order is both harsh and welcome – no concept is available to architecture, the architect can only think in architecture and through architecture. Yet this remains an impossible task. Even the notion of space poses endless problems when it is not accompanied by any philosophical discourse. More than in Foucault’s work and even more than in their own A Thousand Plateaus, the arguments of Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy ? are intentionally presented and function as narratives of spatial transformation – here everything, especially the concept of the concept itself, tumbles into a limitless spatiality, by planes of immanence, ‘asignifying energetics’, curves, folds and moves that double in on themselves. To quote one example ‘Concepts are absolutesurfaces or volumes, formless and fragmentary, whereas the plane is the formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractal’. 4 Planes, volumes and surfaces do not of course determine architectural work, but they remain elements architecture cannot do without. Architectural theory’s ‘fatal’ error would be to confuse a real tendency to spatialise, along with an architectonic drive generally at work in philosophy (and Deleuze and Guattari’s in particular), with specifically architectural formulations. Deleuze and Guattari’s text is not simply concerned with a rhetoric in which the spatial metaphor always remains at the forefront as is common in philosophical discourse – but with a thinking put into effect, of action; with an absolute pragmatism at work at the same time as absolute realism.5

Architecture, seen as the art of building, develops what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘blocs of sensation‘: ‘By aim of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensation. A method is needed, and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work […] In this respect the writer’s position is no different from that of the painter, musician or architect’.6The following formulation of the relationship between philosophy and architectonics is certainly not to be left to architects alone: ‘Philosophy is a constructivism, and constructivism has two qualitatively different complementary aspects: the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane.’ 7Thus What is Philosophy ? tirelessly repeats in different forms that philosophy is the invention of concepts. Architects think that they are able to compete in the field of concept invention, but what does architecture invent? And in what way does it invent differently from science and from philosophy? In what way does its component of material presence determine the expression of its fictions? It would seem that architecture invents the other way around: it begins by proposing the intelligible and then arrives at the real, whereas sciences and philosophy start from the real in order to produce the intelligible.

The present infinitely fragmented condition of architecture opens up the possibility of heterogeneities, or at least seems to produce their simulacra. The situation, however, differs according to cultural and social contexts. In this respect, the French configuration, despite the creative impetus of the state’s ‘Grands Projets’, offers a disappointing image beneath attractive packaging: an obsessive fixation on an all-purpose neo-modernism conflicting with a few repressed creative drives. Anthony Vidler has correctly pinpointed this good modernism which, in the space of a decade, has descended upon French architecture.8 Figures such as Jean Nouvel have a heroic quality to their work, which is at the same time modern and post-modern (with its transparent décor and exposed technique) and occasionally truly remarkable when it manages to bridge such stylistic gaps. For Nouvel, since chaos and complexity are useful concepts, he will use them in his projects. However, his reading of Deleuze and Guattari seems too innocent: ‘Given that the notion of concept is reserved for philosophy, l wonder whether I haven’t been excessive. When I read « there is no simple concept. Every concept has indefinite components … it is a multiplicity », and when I read that a concept has « an irregular contour defined by the number of its components, that every concept has a history, that every concept has a future, that every concept will be considered as the point of coincidence and condensation of its own components », I believe that this can just as easily be applied to a purely architectural concept. That there might be a correspondence between the world of philosophy and the world of architecture. Even though the architectural concept differs in its object, this is not in the formulation, but in the actual making.‘9 By speaking of a ‘purely architectural concept’, Nouvel is shifting meanings. This error of taste marks the disparity, not the possible reconciliation, between the fields of architecture and philosophy. The idea of ‘error of taste’ is also to be taken literally, since the creation of concepts demands a philosophical taste, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us.10

The notions of concept and complexity mingle strangely in an infernal mix. Philosophy’s seemingly new way of lending a helping hand to architectural practice allows certain architects to switch to the latest philosophical arguments. The supply of attractive ideas (in the sense of their obvious aesthetic potential) offered by theories of complexity, is no more nor less available than was the rapid development of the machine for the avant-garde at the beginning of this century. Or if we look at things from an epistemological viewpoint, we have to ask ourselves how this use of the complexity paradigm differs from the introduction of structural linguistics into architecture in the sixties. Either the importation of these ideas encounters the same theoretical difficulties as was the case with linguistics and architecture (although of course there are some exceptions worth mentioning, for example Robert Venturi’s work, and so-called post-modern architecture which would have hardly been possible without linguistics) or because a true change in paradigm would have taken place, this transfer brings with it innovation.

Architects always seem to prefer the uncertainty of half-theories which allow action and are easily manipulated into doctrines for practice.11 Many half-theories can be put together using different notions worked on by various types of knowledge. The simple transfer of a notion or concept from one place to another, guarantees a ‘half-theory’, through the sheer erosion-process that occurs in the transfer. Intuiting brilliant thoughts at work in the most specialised disciplines or fields of the moment has almost become an obligation for the critical architect. The example of Peter Eisenman remains the most significant case in point. Here, ‘intuition’ is not to be confused with ‘incarnation’ or ‘embodiment’; 12 Eisenman’s work takes all its strength and intrinsic limits in his tendency to intuit. Yet, along with his theoretical derivations, his work comes up against its own limitation in so far as, while we are fascinated with its ever-increasing theoretical production and creativity, we tend to forget about Eisenman’s buildings. In a way, the numerous layers of discourse castrates our desire to experience the built work.

After a politics of the sign in architecture which held sway for at least two decades from 1960 onwards, we are now witnessing the emergence of the politics of complexity. The risk of stylistic drifting is and will remain inevitable. How can we avoid labels after having accepted Philip Johnson’s assessment (with his Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA in 1988)? Reading Adorno again is essential, for it was he who stated that style ‘kills’, and saw right through the ‘mandatory aspect of styles as an image of the coercive character of society’.13 Styles are here to stay, in thought and in architecture. Post-structuralist philosophy can no longer escape metaphor – with Derrida, the first to decipher it as it cannot escape style. All of Derrida’s work can be read as a never-ending attempt to resolve the fundamental aporia which simultancously supports and undermines it. And it is precisely due to this property that the critical architect can monopolize Derrida with impunity.

Thus the search for architectural concepts can continue in a new form, as is the case, for example, with Rem Koolhaas and his proposition of ‘Bigness’ or John Rajchman who explicilly announces: ‘Lightness: a concept in architecture’,14 repeating that irrepressible impulse of a conceplual foundation at the heart of the discipline of architecture. We will never suppress the moods and affects brought to the concept, even though asking the question ‘What is it to try to introduce a new concept? To try it out in architecture?‘ already contravenes what Deleuze and Guattari show us, even though and above all if the final answer is ‘Let’s say that it is to question the kinds of uses to which [the concept] gives rise: the free experimentations it helps to make possible.’15 Concerning the concept of the ‘concept’ used in architecture, we would only occasionally have to ‘block the metaphor’, to quote Quine.16

What Deleuze and Guattari proposed, as early on as A Thousand Plateaus, is still pertinent today. I suggest naming their propositions ‘rhizome lessons’ for architecture. This doesn’t mean promoting a rhizomatic trentment for architecture by applying the themes of schizo-analysis to the discipline, which, in any case, has already been attempted by a number of architect-theoreticians. The fine line between risky application and possible use of external concepts or philosophical works is not sufficient for discriminating between two possible approaches.17 This no longer means bringing architectural theory up to date according to the latest paradigm: there is no trans-disciplinary paradigm for the same reason that there is no global science, nor sciences of science, nor delinitive noology. We can re-read architecture with catastrophe and chaos theories just as architecture had previously been read through linguistic and system theories.18 At this rate, however, architectural theory will always be behind. Neither before, nor afler, nor in front, nor at the back, nor beside (here the spatial metaphor comes into play once again); but rather, apart, with its own recovered autonomy, the discipline of architecture can produce its own politics of complexity.

One dimension of architecture is all too often overshadowed by theoretical discourse that of social conditions and the techniques of its practice. The trade and profession of the architect, far from being neutral, are amongst a number of parameters defining architectural practice. We only remember from Manfredo Tafuri the first part of this story – that of the emergence of the architect in the Renaissance - without questioning the rest – namely, the contemporary evolution of architecture producing means. In fact, the role of the architect appears to be undergoing a process of revision. Methods and instruments of simulation and virtual reality are becoming tools for the investigation of all kinds of complexities, not just those of geometric, topological or formal complexity; and they have returned to the architect a capacity for investing in new territories on condition that he/she attributes to them political objectives.

The increase in the number of complex programmes today comes just at the right moment, reinforcing this turn towards the complex. Even the notion of programme itself has exploded, thanks to Rem Koolhaas who has theorised this development. There exist nowadays programmes by which the architect chooses to intensify complexity, a generic case being precisely that of Koolhaas with Euralille, where as many things as possible as stacked on to the TGV tracks, just as Harrison and Gropius stacked the Panam Building on to Grand Central Station.19 Industrial, hospital and cultural programmes all incorporate numerous contradictory practicalities, and tough technical and topological constraints. In the realm of new industries, the modes of production of artefacts incorporate a maximum of intelligence for the minimum of material. Architecture also proposes its artefacts. Complexity in architecture cannot merely find its sources in the sheer complexity of contemporary programmes; it also has to find complexity’s equivalent in thought.

2 Walter Gropius.-Apollo in the Democracy, The Cultural Obligation of the Architect (New York: McGrawHill, 1968).
3 Félix Guattari.-Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris, Editions Galilée, 1989), p293. By far the most difficult of Guattari’s works, this essay has not yet been taken up in the architectural world, no doubt because of its sheer density; yet its graphics and diagrams are an extraordinary collection of heterogeneity and complexity.
4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.- What is Philosophy ? translation H.Tomlinson and G Burchill (London, New York, Verso, 1994) The pan-spatialism which marks philosophy echoes back to Kant, not forgetting that Bergson also spoke of ‘the atmosphere of spatiality’, which, according to him, permeates Kant’s work. See Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907) (London: Macmillan, 1964).
5 Eric Alliez.-La Signature du monde, ou qu’est-ce-que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari (Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1993).Alliez’s reading is particularly pertinent: ‘Have we noticed that the ‘great’ concepts created by Deleuze and Guattari are all concepts of the concept?’
6 Deleuze and Guattari.-op cit, p167
7 Deleuze and Guattari.- op cit, pp35-36
8 Anthony Vidler.-«Transparency » in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992).
9 Jean Nouvel.- Lecture at CCI Centre National d’Art et de Culture, Georges Pompidou, 1992, published in Dépliant No 1, 1994.
10 ‘Philosophical taste neither replaces creation nor restrains it. On the contrary, the creation of concepts calls for a taste that modulates it. The free creation of determined concepts needs a taste for the undetermined concept.’ See Deleuze and Guattari, op cit, p78
11 See Novalis.- ‘A half-theory turns away from practice – a total theory leads back to it’, in L’Encyclopédie, 81 (IV-738).
12 See Kipnis, op cit, note 15, p49.
13 Theodor Adorno.- Aesthetic Theory (London, Routledge, 1983)

14 John Rajchman.- in ANY No 5, March/April 1994, pp5-7.
15 Ibid, pp5-7.
16 William Quine.-Quiddities. An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/Harvard University Press), ‘Block that metaphor. These are poles not Poles’, p18.
17 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Architecture from the Outside: Deleuze and Thought’,in Newsline Vol 7, No 3, p2.
18 For a previous discussion on the transfer of concepts in architecture, see my position as expressed in ‘The Oceanship Theory: Architectural Epistemology in Rough Waters’, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts No 2, 1990, pp79-83.
19 Koolhaas remarks: ‘only through the complexity and impossibility of the whole operation could it be finished in a given time’, in ‘Operations’, Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory (D), Vol 3, 1993 (Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation), pp25-56. Edited transcript of a lecture given at Columbia University, 19 October 1992.

19 KOOLHAAS remarque :« only through the complexity and impossibility of the whole operation could it be finished in a given time » -KOOLHAAS (Rem) Urban operations, in: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory (D), Volume Three, 1993 (Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation) pp.25-56 Edited transcript of a lecture given by R.Koolhaas at Columbia University on october 19th, 1992